Stage space and time as a material of art. Stage space Zoya Sanina, Anninsky school, Lomonosov district, Leningrad region

Legends of the Dagestan scene Kadarets Soltanmejid liked a girl from the Lower Dzhengutai named Bala-khanum, a beauty - not a beauty, a slightly elongated face, on which large eyes and plump lips stood out. Her merits include the fact that she possessed

Chapter Four In the box of the Kyiv scene

Stage device.

Source: What is what? Reference dictionary for young man» Petr Monastyrsky

Backstage. The back of the stage, which serves as a back-up storage space for the scenery.

Grids. The upper part located above the scene board. The main element of the grate is the flooring of the bars, mounted at an appropriate distance from each other. This position allows them to raise or lower the scenery and other elements of the ongoing performance. Above and below the grates, blocks for moving cables, lighting fixtures and everything that needs to be hidden from the eyes of the audience are installed.

The tablet. Paul in stage box. It is placed in such a way that there are no cracks in it. This is related to health protection, safety for the feet. In drama theaters, the tablet is made with mortise turntables and concentric rings. Such “small mechanization” allows solving additional creative tasks.

Ring-circle. One of the most important elements of the machinery on the stage is a circle cut into the tablet and rotating flush with the fixed part of the tablet. In the last three or four decades, a ring has also appeared in stage machinery. It can rotate with the circle if it is attached with appropriate fasteners. If necessary, it can rotate autonomously from the circle. This complex mechanic helps solve many of the artist's and director's scenographic ideas. Especially when the circle, for example, moves clockwise, and the ring moves counterclockwise. When used properly, these tools may produce additional video effects.

Proscenium. Part of the stage, slightly extended into the auditorium. In drama theaters, it serves as a scene for small scenes in front of a closed curtain, which are a link between the main scenes of the performance.

"Pocket". Convenient service rooms on both sides of the stage box, where, firstly, elements of the stage design of performances of the current repertoire can be stored, and secondly, moving furkas can be mounted on which the necessary scenery is assembled for presentation to the stage so that the next one can be played against their background episode. Thus, while the left furka is involved in the performance, the right one is loaded for the next episode. This technology provides the dynamics of changing the "place of action".

Backstage. In the theater, part of the hanging scenery, part of the "clothes of the stage." They are located on the sides of the stage box, parallel or at an angle to the portal, limit the playing space, mask the scenery standing on the sides of the stage, cover the side spaces of the stage, hiding the technical equipment, lighting equipment and artists ready to go. Backstage makes invisible what is behind them.

scene portal. Cutouts in the front wall of the stage separating it from the auditorium, the left and right portals form the so-called stage mirror. In addition to the permanent stone ones, there are two movable ones on the stage, with their help the stage can be reduced in size.

Stage mirror. Reception in the architectural portal that separates the stage box from the auditorium.

Decoration. Nowadays, when deciding on the artistic design of a performance, it is preferable to talk about scenography, and not about scenery. For as long as the theater has existed, the scenery for performances has been an obligatory component only as a characteristic of the scene. This was required, firstly, by the appointment of a performance in which the actors told the story. Secondly, the author's remarks obliged them to issue them at the prompt of the place of action. But since the figure of the director appeared in the theater, everything began to change in the direction of creating the image of the performance, its emotional interpretation ... The theater ceased to be a straightforward spectacle, it began to speak in allegories, allusions. Elementary scenery in this case could no longer be useful: it could not provide any interesting union between the stage and the audience. Under the new conditions, scenography has already become necessary, which, over time, has begun to win the hearts of both the audience and the greatest artists-creators of the performance.

Stage clothing. Framing of the stage box, consisting of backstage, padug, backdrop. The padugs are fixed above the tablet on horizontal poles. They "hide" the entire economy, located at the top, the valance is also a hollow, but it is located closer to the viewer and covers the battery and the first spotlight. The wooden floor, which is not very attractive in appearance, is covered with rugs; in every serious theater there are several such sets, depending on the circumstances. As a rule, stage clothing is a rather expensive pleasure.

Paduga. A strip of fabric in the same color as the wings, suspended horizontally from the top of the stage box. It also covers the view of the audience “technical dirt located under the grate (soffits, lights, other design elements).

Valance. A frill, a lace border that runs along the edge of something. Attached to the harness.

Shtanket. A detail of the stage mechanism is a rod from the left to the right bridge, lowering and raising the elements of scenery tied to it, driven by hands or a motor.

Back. A large pictorial canvas, which can be the backdrop for the performance. It should be recalled that the backdrop does not have to be picturesque. It can sometimes be just part of the stage outfit. This means that it can be neutral in the same color as the backstage and padugs.

Soffit. A battery of lights assembled in a certain programmed sequence, directed downwards on the tablet or on the back or on the auditorium, or on different parts of the stage box.

Ramp. A long low barrier along the proscenium, hiding from the audience lighting fixtures aimed at the stage.

Proscenium. Stage space in front of the curtain. The proscenium is also an additional area that can be used for interludes, screensavers between paintings, for communication with the audience.

The curtain. The curtain that separates the stage from the auditorium, after each action, the curtain, to rise again after the intermission. In addition to the main curtain, in large theaters there is also a super-curtain hanging on the first pole and a fire curtain, which is lowered after each performance to isolate the stage from the auditorium. Every day before the performance, the fire curtain goes up and hangs up there, on alert, in case of a fire.

For implementation theatrical production certain conditions are needed, a certain space in which the actors will act and the audience will be located. In every theatre, in a specially constructed building, in the square where traveling troupes perform, in the circus, on the stage, the spaces of the auditorium and the stage are laid everywhere. How these two spaces relate, how their form is defined, etc., determines the nature of the relationship between the actor and the viewer, the conditions for perceiving the performance. established at this stage of development. The relation of both spaces to each other, the ways of their combination are the subject of the history of the theatrical stage.

Spectator and stage spaces together make up the theater space. At the heart of any form of theatrical space there are two principles for the location of actors and spectators in relation to each other: axial and center. In the axial solution of the theater, the stage is located frontally in front of the audience and they are, as it were, on the same axis with the performers. In the center or, as they are also called, beam - seats for spectators surround the stage from three or four sides.

Fundamental to all types of scenes is the way in which both spaces are combined. There can also be only two solutions here: either a clear separation of the volume of the stage and the auditorium, or their partial or complete merging in a single, undivided space. In other words, in one variant the auditorium and the stage are placed, as it were, in different rooms that are in contact with each other, in the other, both the hall and the stage are located in a single spatial volume.

Depending on these solutions, it is possible to quite accurately classify various forms of the scene (Fig. 1).

A stage area bounded on all sides by walls, one of which has a wide opening facing the auditorium, is called a box stage. Seats for spectators are located in front of the stage along its front within the normal visibility of the playing area. Thus, the box stage belongs to the axial type of theatre, with a sharp separation of both spaces. The box stage is characterized by a closed stage space, and therefore it belongs to the category of closed stages. The stage, in which the dimensions of the portal opening coincide with the width and height of the auditorium, is a kind of box.

The stage-arena has an arbitrary shape, but more often a round platform, around which there are seats for spectators. The arena stage is a typical example of a center theater. The spaces of the stage and the hall are merged here.

The spatial stage is actually one of the types of the arena and also belongs to the center type of the theater. Unlike the arena, the area of ​​the spatial stage is not surrounded by seats for spectators from all sides, but only partially, with a small angle of coverage. Depending on the solution, the spatial scene can be both axial and center. In modern solutions, in order to achieve greater versatility of the stage space, the space stage is often combined with the box stage. The arena and the space stage belong to the open type stages and are often referred to as open stages.

Rice. 1. The main forms of the stage: 1 - stage-box; 2- stage-arena; 3 - spatial scene (a - open area, b - open area with a box stage); 4 - circular stage (a - open, b - closed); 5 - simultaneous scene (a - a single platform, b - separate platforms)

There are two types of ring stage: closed and open. In principle, this is a stage platform, made in the form of a movable or fixed ring, inside which there are places for spectators. Most of this ring can be hidden from the audience by walls, and then the ring is used as one of the ways to mechanize the box stage. In its purest form, the ring stage is not separated from the auditorium, being in the same space with it. The ring scene belongs to the category of axial scenes.

The essence of the simulation scene is the simultaneous display of different scenes of action on one or more sites located in the auditorium. Various compositions of playgrounds and places for spectators do not allow us to attribute this scene to one or another type. One thing is certain, that in this solution of theatrical space, the most complete fusion of the stage and spectator zones is achieved, the boundaries of which are sometimes difficult to determine.

All existing forms of theatrical space in one way or another vary the named principles of the mutual arrangement of the stage and seats for spectators. These principles can be traced back to the first theater constructions in Ancient Greece to modern buildings.

The box stage is the basic stage of modern theater. Therefore, before proceeding to the presentation of the main stages in the development of theatrical architecture, it is necessary to dwell on its structure, equipment and technology for designing a performance.

monumental art(lat. monumentum, from moneo - remind) - one of the plastic spatial fine and non-fine arts; this kind of them includes works of large format, created in accordance with the architectural or natural environment, compositional unity and interaction with which they themselves acquire ideological and figurative completeness, and communicate the same to the environment. Works of monumental art are created by masters of different creative professions and in different techniques. Monumental art includes monuments and memorial sculptural compositions, paintings and mosaic panels, decorative decoration of buildings, stained-glass windows.

The art of theater has its own specific language. Only the knowledge of this language provides the viewer with the possibility of artistic communication with the author and actors. An incomprehensible language is always strange (Pushkin in the manuscripts for "Eugene Onegin" spoke of "strange, new languages", and ancient Russian scribes likened those speaking in incomprehensible languages ​​to dumb ones: "There is also a cave, that language is dumb and with a Samoyed they sit at midnight" 269* ). When Leo Tolstoy, reviewing the whole building of contemporary civilization, rejected the language of opera as “unnatural,” the opera immediately turned into nonsense, and he rightly wrote: they express feelings that they don’t go anywhere else with foil halberds, in shoes, pairs, except in the theater, that they never get so angry, they don’t feel touched, they don’t laugh like that, they don’t cry ... there can’t be any 407 doubts" 270* . The assumption that a theatrical spectacle has some kind of conventional language of its own only if it is strange and incomprehensible to us, and exists “so simply”, without any specific language, if it seems natural and understandable to us, is naive. After all, the kabuki theater or no seems natural and understandable to the Japanese audience, while Shakespeare's theater, which for centuries of European culture was a model of naturalness, seemed artificial to Tolstoy. The language of the theater is made up of national and cultural traditions, and it is natural that a person immersed in the same cultural tradition feels its specifics to a lesser extent.

One of the foundations of the theatrical language is the specificity of the artistic space of the stage. It is she who sets the type and measure of theatrical conventionality. Struggling for a realistic theater, a theater of the truth of life, Pushkin expressed the profound idea that the naive identification scenes and lives or a simple cancellation of the specifics of the first not only will not solve the problem, but is practically impossible. In the outline of the preface to Boris Godunov, he wrote: “Both the classics and the romantics based their rules on credibility and yet it is precisely this that is excluded by the very nature of the dramatic work. Not to mention the time and so on, what the hell can be plausible 1) in a hall divided into two halves, one of which accommodates two thousand people, as if invisible to those who are on the stage; 2) language. For example, in La Harpe, Philoctetes, after listening to Pyrrhus's tirade, pronounces in the purest French: “Alas! I hear the sweet sounds of Hellenic speech” and so on. Remember the ancients: their tragic masks, their double roles - isn't all this a conditional improbability? 3) time, place, etc. and so on.

408 The true geniuses of tragedy never cared about verisimilitude." It is significant that Pushkin separates the “conditional improbability” of the language of the stage from the question of genuine stage truth, which he sees in the life reality of the development of characters and the veracity of speech characteristics: “The plausibility of positions and the veracity of dialogue - this is the true rule of tragedy.” He considered Shakespeare to be a model of such truthfulness (whom Tolstoy reproached for abusing “unnatural events and even more unnatural speeches that do not follow from the positions of persons”): “Read Shakespeare, he is never afraid to compromise his hero (by violating the conventional rules of stage “decency”. - Y. L.), he makes him speak with complete ease, as in life, for he is sure that at the right moment and under the right circumstances he will find for him a language corresponding to his character. It is noteworthy that it was the nature of the stage space (“hall”) that Pushkin put at the basis of the “conditional improbability” of the language of the stage.

The theatrical space is divided into two parts: the stage and the auditorium, between which relationships develop that form some of the main oppositions of theatrical semiotics. First, this opposition existence - non-existence. The being and reality of these two parts of the theater are realized, as it were, in two different dimensions. From the point of view of the viewer, from the moment the curtain rises and the play begins, the auditorium ceases to exist. Everything on this side of the ramp disappears. His true reality becomes invisible and gives way to the wholly illusory reality of stage action. In the modern European theater, this is emphasized by the immersion of the auditorium into darkness at the moment the light is turned on on the stage and vice versa. If we imagine a person so far from theatrical conventions that at the moment of dramatic action he not only with equal attention, but also with the help of the same type of vision observes at the same time the scene, the movements of the prompter in the booth, the illuminators in the box, the spectators in the hall, seeing in this some unity, then it will be possible with good reason 409 to say that the art of being a spectator is unknown to him. The border of the "invisible" is clearly felt by the viewer, although it is not always as simple as in the theater we are used to. So, in the Japanese bunraku puppet theater, the puppeteers are right there on the stage and are physically visible to the viewer. However, they are dressed in black clothes, which is a "sign of invisibility", and the public "as if" does not see them. Turned off from the artistic space of the stage, they fall out of the field theatrical vision. Interestingly, from the standpoint of Japanese bunraku theorists, the introduction of a puppeteer to the stage is estimated as improvement: “Once the puppet was driven by one person, hidden under the stage and controlling it with his hands so that the public saw only the puppet. Later, the design of the puppet was improved step by step, and in the end the puppet was controlled on stage by three people (the puppeteers are dressed in black from head to toe and are therefore called “black people”)” 271* .

From the point of view of the stage, the auditorium also does not exist: according to Pushkin’s precise and subtle remark, the audience “ as if(emphasis mine. - Y. L.) are invisible to those on the stage.” However, Pushkin's "as if" is not accidental: invisibility here has a different, much more playful character. It is enough to imagine such a series:

to make sure that only in the first case the separation of the space of the spectator from the space of the text hides the dialogic nature of their relationship. Only the theater requires an addressee that is present at the same time and perceives the signals coming from him (silence, signs 410 approval or condemnation), varying the text accordingly. It is with this - dialogic - nature of the stage text that such a feature of it as variability is associated. The concept of "canonical text" is as alien to the spectacle as it is to folklore. It is replaced by the concept of some invariant, which is realized in a number of variants.

Other significant opposition: significant - insignificant. The stage space is characterized by a high symbolic saturation - everything that enters the stage tends to be saturated with additional meanings in relation to the directly objective function of the thing. Movement becomes a gesture, a thing - a detail that carries meaning. It was this feature of the stage that Goethe had in mind when he answered Ackermann's question: "What must a work be like in order to be staged?" “It must be symbolic,” Goethe replied. - This means that each action should be full of its own significance and at the same time prepare for another, even more significant. Molière's Tartuffe is a great example in this respect." 272* . In order to understand Goethe's thought, one must keep in mind that he uses the word "symbol" in the same sense in which we would say "sign", noting that an act, a gesture and a word on the stage acquire in relation to their counterparts in everyday life. life, additional meanings are saturated with complex meanings, allowing us to say that they become expressions for a bunch of various meaningful moments.

In order to make Goethe's deep thought more clear, let us quote the following phrase from this entry following the words we have quoted: “Remember the first scene - what an exposition in it! Everything from the very beginning is full of meaning and excites the expectation of even more important events to follow. The “fullness of meanings” that Goethe speaks of is connected with the fundamental laws of the stage and constitutes an essential difference between actions and words on stage from actions 411 and words in life. A person who makes speeches or performs actions in life has in mind the hearing and perception of his interlocutor. The scene reproduces the same behavior, but the nature of the addressee is twofold here: the speech refers to another character on the stage, but in fact it is addressed not only to him, but also to the audience. The participant in the action may not know what the content of the preceding scene was, but the audience knows it. The spectator, like the participant in the action, does not know the future course of events, but, unlike him, he knows all the previous ones. The viewer's knowledge is always higher than the character's. What the participant in the action may not pay attention to is a sign loaded with meanings for the viewer. Desdemona's handkerchief for Othello is evidence of her betrayal, for the stalls it is a symbol of Iago's deceit. In the example of Goethe, in the first act of Moliere's comedy, the mother of the protagonist, Madame Pernel, just as blinded by the deceiver Tartuffe as her son, enters into an argument with the whole house, protecting the hypocrite. Orgon is not on stage at this time. Then Orgon appears, and the scene, just seen by the audience, seems to be played a second time, but with his participation, and not with Madame Pernel. Only in the third act does Tartuffe himself appear on the scene. By this time, the audience has already received a complete picture of him, and his every gesture and word becomes for them symptoms of lies and hypocrisy. The scene of Tartuffe seducing Elmira is also repeated twice. Orgon does not see the first of them (the audience sees her), and refuses to believe the verbal revelations of his family. He observes the second from under the table: Tartuffe is trying to seduce Elmira, thinking that no one sees them, but meanwhile he is under double surveillance: a hidden husband lies in wait for him inside the stage space, and an auditorium is located outside the ramp. Finally, all this complex construction receives an architectonic completion when Orgon retells to his mother what he saw with his own eyes, and she, again acting as his double, refuses to believe the words and even the eyes of Orgon and, in the spirit of farcical humor, reproaches her son for not waited for more tangible evidence of adultery. The action constructed in this way, on the one hand, acts as 412 a chain of different episodes (syntagmatic construction), and the other - as a multiple variation of some nuclear action (paradigmatic construction). This gives rise to that “fullness of meanings” about which Goethe spoke. The meaning of this nuclear action is in the clash of hypocrisy of a hypocrite, deft twists and turns representing black as white, gullible stupidity and common sense, exposing tricks. The episodes are based on the semantic mechanism of lies carefully revealed by Moliere: Tartuffe tears words from their true meaning, arbitrarily changes and twists their meaning. Molière makes him not a trivial liar and rogue, but a clever and dangerous demagogue. Moliere exposes the mechanism of his demagogy to a comic exposure: in the play, before the eyes of the viewer, verbal signs that are conditionally related to their content and, therefore, allow not only information, but also disinformation, and reality change places; the formula "I do not believe the words, because I see with my eyes" is replaced for Orgon by the paradoxical "I do not believe my eyes, because I hear the words." The position of the spectator is even more piquant: what is reality for Orgon is a spectacle for the spectator. Two messages unfold before him: what he sees, on the one hand, and what Tartuffe says about this, on the other. At the same time, he hears the intricate words of Tartuffe and the rude, but true words of the bearers of common sense (first of all, the maid Dorina). The clash of these diverse semiotic elements creates not only a sharp comic effect, but also that richness of meaning that delighted Goethe.

The semiotic concentration of stage speech in relation to everyday speech does not depend on whether the author, by virtue of his belonging to one or another literary movement, is guided by the "language of the gods" or by the exact reproduction of a real conversation. This is the law of the scene. Chekhov's "ta-ra-ra-bumbia" or remark about the heat in Africa are caused by the desire to bring stage speech closer to real, but it is quite obvious that their semantic richness infinitely exceeds that which similar statements would have in a real situation.

413 Signs are of various types, depending on which the degree of their conditionality changes. Signs of the "word" type quite conditionally connect a certain meaning with a certain expression (the same meaning in different languages ​​has a different expression); pictorial (“iconic”) signs connect the content with an expression that has a similarity in a certain respect: the content “tree” is connected with the drawn image of a tree. A sign over a bakery, written in some language, is a conventional sign, understandable only to those who speak this language; the wooden “bakery pretzel”, which “golden a little” above the entrance to the shop, is an iconic sign that everyone who has eaten a pretzel understands. Here the degree of conventionality is much less, but a certain semiotic skill is still necessary: ​​the visitor sees a similar form, but different colors, material, and, most importantly, function. The wooden pretzel is not for food, but for notification. Finally, the observer should be able to use semantic figures (in this case, metonymy): the pretzel should not be “read” as a message about what is being sold here only pretzels, but as evidence of the ability to buy any bakery product. However, from the point of view of the measure of convention, there is a third case. Imagine not a signboard, but a shop window (for clarity of the case, let's put an inscription on it: "Goods from the shop window are not for sale"). Before us are the real things themselves, but they do not appear in their direct objective function, but as signs of themselves. That is why the showcase so easily combines photographic and artistic images of the items being sold, verbal texts, numbers and indexes, and authentic real things - all of which act as an iconic function.

Stage action as a unity of actors acting and performing actions, verbal texts spoken by them, scenery and props, sound and light design is a text of considerable complexity, using signs of different types and varying degrees of conventionality. However, the fact that the stage world is inherently symbolic gives it an extremely important 414 hell. The sign is inherently contradictory: it is always real and always illusory. It is real because the nature of the sign is material; in order to become a sign, that is, to turn into a social fact, meaning must be realized in some material substance: value must take shape in the form of banknotes; thought - to appear as a combination of phonemes or letters, to be expressed in paint or marble; dignity - put on “signs of dignity”: orders or uniforms, etc. The illusory nature of the sign is that it is always seems, that is, it denotes something other than his appearance. To this it should be added that in the sphere of art the ambiguity of the plane of content increases sharply. The contradiction between reality and illusory forms the field of semiotic meanings in which every literary text lives. One of the features of the stage text is the variety of languages ​​it uses.

The basis of stage action is an actor playing a person enclosed in the space of the stage. Aristotle revealed the symbolic nature of stage action extremely deeply, believing that “tragedy is an imitation of action” - not the actual action itself, but its reproduction by means of the theater: “Imitation of action is a story (the term “story” was introduced by translators to convey the fundamental concept of tragedy in Aristotle : “telling with the help of actions and events”; in traditional terminology, the concept of “plot” is closest to it. Y. L.). In fact, I call a legend a combination of events. “The beginning and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy is precisely a legend” 273* . However, it is precisely this basic element of stage action that receives a double semiotic illumination during the performance. A chain of events unfolds on the stage, the characters perform actions, the scenes follow each other. Inside itself, this world lives a genuine, not symbolic life: each actor “believes” in the full reality of both himself on stage and his partner and actions in 415 in general 274* . The viewer, on the other hand, is in the grip of aesthetic, and not real, experiences: seeing that one actor on the stage falls dead, and other actors, realizing the plot of the play, carry out actions that are natural in this situation - they rush to help, call doctors, take revenge on the killers - the viewer leads himself differently: whatever his experiences, he remains motionless in the chair. For the people on the stage, an event takes place; for the people in the hall, the event is a sign of itself. Like a product in a shop window, reality becomes a message about reality. But after all, the actor on stage conducts dialogues in two different planes: expressed communication connects him with other participants in the action, and unexpressed silent dialogue connects him with the audience. In both cases, he acts not as a passive object of observation, but as an active participant in communication. Consequently, his existence on the stage is fundamentally ambiguous: it can be read with equal justification both as an immediate reality and as a reality turned into a sign of itself. Constant fluctuation between these extremes gives vitality to the performance, and transforms the viewer from a passive recipient of a message into a participant in that collective act of consciousness that takes place in the theater. The same can be said about the verbal side of the performance, which is both real speech, oriented towards extra-theatrical, non-artistic conversation, and the reproduction of this speech by means of theatrical conventions (speech depicts speech). No matter how hard the artist strives in an era when the language of a literary text is fundamentally opposed to everyday life, to separate these spheres of speech activity, the influence of the second on the first turned out to be fatally inevitable. This is confirmed by the study of rhymes and vocabulary of the dramaturgy of the era of classicism. Simultaneously 416 there was a reverse effect of the theater on everyday speech. And on the contrary, no matter how hard the realist artist tries to transfer onto the stage the unchanging element of non-artistic oral speech, this is always not a “transplantation of tissue”, but its translation into the language of the stage. An interesting recording by A. Goldenweiser of the words of L. N. Tolstoy: “Once, somehow, in the dining room below, there were lively conversations of young people. L.N., who, it turns out, was lying and resting in the next room, then went out into the dining room and said to me: “I was lying there and listening to your conversations. They interested me from two sides: it was simply interesting to listen to the disputes of young people, and then from the point of view of the drama. I listened and said to myself: this is how you should write for the stage. One speaks and the other listens. This never happens. It is necessary that everyone speaks (at the same time. - Y. L.)”» 275* . It is all the more interesting that with such a creative orientation in Tolstoy's plays, the main text is built in the tradition of the stage, and Tolstoy met Chekhov's attempts to transfer the illogicality and fragmentation of oral speech to the stage negatively, opposing Shakespeare, blasphemed by him, Tolstoy, as a positive example. A parallel here may be the ratio of oral and written speech in artistic prose. The writer does not transfer oral speech into his text (although he often strives to create the illusion of such a transfer and may himself succumb to such an illusion), but translates it into the language of written speech. Even the ultra-avant-garde experiments of modern French prose writers, who refuse punctuation and deliberately destroy the correctness of the syntax of a phrase, are not an automatic copy of oral speech: oral speech, put on paper, that is, devoid of intonation, facial expressions, gesture, torn from the obligatory for two interlocutors, but missing for readers of a special “common memory”, firstly, it would become completely incomprehensible, and secondly, it would by no means be “accurate” - it would not be living oral speech, but its killed and skinned corpse, more distant from the model than a talented and conscious transformation of it under the pen of an artist. 417 Stopping being a copy and becoming a sign, stage speech is saturated with additional complex meanings drawn from the cultural memory of the stage and the audience.

The premise of the stage spectacle is the viewer's conviction that certain laws of reality in the space of the stage can become the object of playful study, that is, undergo deformation or cancellation. Thus, time on the stage can flow faster (and in some rare cases, for example, in Maeterlinck, more slowly) than in reality. The very equating of stage and real time in some aesthetic systems (for example, in the theater of classicism) has a secondary character. The subordination of time to the laws of the scene makes it an object of study. On the stage, as in any closed space of the ritual, the semantic coordinates of the space are emphasized. Categories such as “top - bottom”, “right - left”, “open - closed”, etc., acquire on the stage, even in the most everyday decisions, increased importance. Thus, Goethe wrote in his Rules for Actors: “For the sake of a falsely understood naturalness, actors should never act as if there were no spectators in the theater. They shouldn't play profile 276* , just as you should not turn your back on the public ... The most revered persons always stand on the right side. Interestingly, in emphasizing the modeling meaning of the concept of "right - left", Goethe has in mind the point of view of the viewer. In the inner space of the stage, in his opinion, there are other laws: “If I have to give my hand, and the situation does not require that it must be the right hand, then with the same success you can give the left one, because there is neither right nor left on the stage. ".

The semiotic nature of scenery and props will become more understandable to us if we compare it with analogous moments of such art, which, it would seem, is close, but in fact is opposed to theater, like cinema. Despite the fact that both in the theater hall and in the cinema before 418 By us the viewer (the one who looks) that this viewer is throughout the entire spectacle in the same fixed position, their attitude to that aesthetic category, which in the structural theory of art is called “point of view”, is profoundly different. The theatrical spectator maintains a natural point of view on the spectacle, determined by the optical relation of his eye to the stage. Throughout the performance, this position remains unchanged. Between the eye of the movie viewer and the screen image, on the contrary, there is an intermediary - the lens of the movie camera directed by the operator. The viewer, as it were, conveys his point of view to him. And the device is mobile - it can come close to the object, drive off to a long distance, look from above and below, look at the hero from the outside and look at the world through his eyes. As a result, the plan and foreshortening become active elements of film expression, realizing a mobile point of view. The difference between theater and cinema can be compared to the difference between a drama and a novel. The drama also retains a “natural” point of view, while between the reader and the event in the novel there is an author-narrator who has the ability to put the reader in any spatial, psychological and other positions in relation to the event. As a result, the functions of the scenery and things (props) in cinema and theater are different. The thing in the theater never plays an independent role, it is only an attribute of the actor's performance, while in the cinema it can be both a symbol and a metaphor, and a full-fledged character. This, in particular, is determined by the possibility of shooting it in close-up, keeping attention on it by increasing the number of frames allocated for its display, etc. 277*

In the cinema, the detail plays, in the theater - it is played out. The attitude of the viewer to the artistic space is also different. In the cinema, the illusory space of the image, as it were, draws the viewer into itself; in the theater, the viewer is invariably outside the artistic space (in this 419 In this regard, paradoxically, cinema is closer to folklore and farcical spectacular performances than modern non-experimental urban theater). Hence, the marking function, which is much more emphasized in theatrical scenery, is most clearly expressed in the pillars with inscriptions in Shakespeare's Globe. The scenery often takes on the role of a title in a movie or the author's remarks before the text of a drama. Pushkin gave the scenes in Boris Godunov titles like: “Maiden's Field. Novodevichy Convent”, “The Plain near Novgorod-Seversky (1604, December 21)” or “Tavern on the Lithuanian border”. These titles, to the same extent as the titles of chapters in the novel (for example, in The Captain's Daughter), are included in the poetic structure of the text. However, on the stage they are replaced by an isofunctional iconic adequate - a decoration that determines the place and time of the action. No less important is another function of theatrical scenery: together with the ramp, it marks the boundaries of the theatrical space. The feeling of the border, the closeness of the artistic space in the theater is much more pronounced than in the cinema. This leads to a significant increase in the modeling function. If the cinema in its “natural” function tends to be perceived as a document, an episode from reality, and special artistic efforts are required in order to give it the appearance of a model of life as such, then the theater is no less “natural” to be perceived precisely as the embodiment of reality. in an extremely generalized form and special artistic efforts are required in order to give it the appearance of documentary "scenes from life".

An interesting example of the collision of theatrical and film space as a space of "modeling" and "real" is Visconti's film "Feeling". The film is set in the 1840s during the anti-Austrian uprising in northern Italy. The first frames take us to the theater to the performance of Verdi's Il trovatore. The frame is built in such a way that the theatrical stage appears as a closed, fenced-off space, the space of a conditional costume and a theatrical gesture (the figure of a prompter with a book is typical, 420 located outside this space). The world of film action (it is significant that the characters here are also in historical costumes and act in an environment of objects and in an interior that is sharply different from modern life) appears as real, chaotic and confusing. The theatrical performance acts as an ideal model, ordering and serving as a kind of code to this world.

The scenery in the theater defiantly retains its connection with painting, while in the cinema this connection is utterly disguised. Goethe's well-known rule - "the scene must be considered as a picture without figures, in which the latter are replaced by actors." Let us refer again to Visconti's "Feeling" - a frame depicting Franz against the background of a fresco reproducing a theater stage (the film image recreates a mural recreating a theater) depicting the conspirators. The conspicuous contrast of artistic languages 278* only emphasizes that the conditionality of the scenery acts as a key to the confusing and, for him, the most obscure state of mind of the hero.